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Dessert

Pancakes, Scotch

A light, fluffy pancake made with flour, milk, eggs, lemon, ratafia, and sugar, served with jam and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pancakes, Scotch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix flour with a little cold milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. Add salt, beaten egg yolks, lemon juice, ratafia flavoring, sugar, and new milk or cream.

  3. Leave the batter in a cool place until ready to use.

Fry and serve

  1. Just before frying, stir in the beaten egg whites until frothy.

  2. Fry the pancakes as usual, browning the top with a salamander or hot fire-shovel instead of flipping.

  3. Spread jam or marmalade on the pancakes, roll them up, and serve on a hot dish with powdered sugar sifted over.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the paste that gives the pancakes their body and structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness, colour and binding to the batter.
Milk or cream
Supplies moisture and softness to the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten egg whites just before frying. Beaten egg whites trap air that lifts the batter. If they are added too early and the batter stands, the foam collapses and the pancakes turn out flatter and denser.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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